


The Sleeping Heterodyne

by gisho



Series: Background Characters [1]
Category: Girl Genius
Genre: Fairy Tales, Meta, Mid-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-28 00:43:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16230668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: Two fairy-tale thinkers meet in a bookstore and talk about what's going on behind a thorn hedge in Transylvania.  (Written for GG Event Week 2018.)





	The Sleeping Heterodyne

\--

"It's so romantic, don't you think?"

Elizabeth blinks at the book display. Blackwater Books is the kind of store that puts history right next to the penny-sparklies, in an effort to be educational, and the display is topped with twenty copies of _Missing Mechanicsburg: Historical Banishments, Thefts, and Unexplained Disappearances of the Storied City_. "What's romantic?"

"What Baron Wulfenbach is doing," says the girl beside her, who's clutching _Frozen Just In Time_. "To save the Lady Heterodyne. It's like something out of a fairy tale."

"One of the ones that end with the wicked stepmother getting burned alive, you mean?"

"That's awfully cynical of you." The girl frowns down at her. "I mean it - doesn't make sense, except if he's obeying the _inexorable exhortations of his soul_. It's not like Mechanicsburg wouldn't come back on its own, right? Sooner or later."

Elizabeth considers this. "But usually it's been the Heterodyne bringing it back. And if the Lady Heterodyne is trapped in a bubble of frozen time she can't do anything about it from inside."

"Maybe it's not really frozen inside." The girl is obviously warming to her topic; she waves her hands hard enough to make the blue ribbons on her dress flutter. "Everyone thought the town had been drowned in fifteen-seventy, and the whole valley was covered in a glacier, and then they burst out of it on a bubble of fire and flooded all the way to the On. Well. I don't mean remember, unless you're Albia in disguise or something, but you must have read about it, right? Only that wasn't very fairy-tale. It barely took six months."

It had been the first chapter in _Missing Mechanicsburg_. Elizabeth nods, suddenly painfully aware that her curls are bouncing. "It'd make an interesting quest," she allows. "The Baron working from outside and the Lady Heterodyne from inside. I don't think there are any fairytales like that. Unless you count Rapunzel."

"I hope not. Just because there's a bunch of thorn bushes doesn't mean anybody should get thrown in them and put their eyes out." The girl wrinkles her nose. "There are a couple where the trapped maiden tells her suitor how to succeed at some impossible challenge. Gives him a woodcutting clank to saw down a whole forest in a day, or things like that. But mostly in those she's just trapped by an overbearing father."

The only example Elizabeth can remember of a story about impossible challenges involved the beleaguered suitor begging for help from King Arthur. It's possible this girl has read more fairy tales than she has. Probable, even; Elizabeth usually prefers nonfiction. She'll have to ask for recommendations once her father gets back with the bags. But for now she turns that idea over in her head.

It doesn't quite fit. "Lady Heterodyne's father was Bill Heterodyne. And the Heterodyne Boys would make terrible fairy-tale villains," Elizabeth points out. 

The girl sighs. "I know. They're more like the older brothers."

"What do you mean?"

"It's always the third son who wins, isn't it? Two brothers go try some adventure and get turned into stone, or a witch transforms them into dogs to pull her sled, or something like that, and then the third son has to rescue them on top of slaying the evil wizard in a chess game or whatever they were all trying to do in the first place. And the Heterodyne Boys went after the Other and never came back. Maybe if there'd been three of them ..."

She looks slightly disgruntled at this idea, as if Saturnus and Theodora had stopped at two out of spite, or a distaste for fairytales. Elizabeth wants to giggle at it, but it's hard enough to get people to take her seriously at her height. Giggling is _right out_. She'll show them all someday, but probably not for at least five years. Elizabeth settles for, "But if there were three of them _only_ the third one would have ever defeated a monster. So it's for the best."

"I like the way you think."

"Besides, we don't know they're never coming back." Some people were quite convinced of the opposite. There had been a fascinating poem in the Parisian Review. 

Actually, that's a worthwhile idea, and from the way the girl is rubbing her chin with one knuckle and staring into space she thinks so to. "Maybe." She's wearing a fashionable little bolero jacket with lace trim, and her hand vanishes inside and somehow comes back out with a duodecimo-size notebook. How she was hiding a pocket that big Elizabeth has no idea. "But if they were coming back for anything you'd think it would have been Mechanicsburg getting frozen in the first place. Excuse me a minute, I need to make a chart."

Her nails are painted gold. Elizabeth watches her hands in fascination as she scribbles 'MBURG/CASTLE/TOMB' in the middle of the page, circles it twice with hasty motions, hard enough her pen is leaving dents, then starts filling in the edges. 

"Are you a writer?" she asks, when the girl stops for breath. It would explain why she was paying so much attention to the motifs.

"I scribble a little. Essays." She's scribbling now, adding spiky curlicues on the edges of MBURG. "And I'm _working_ on a historical novel about the Shining Coalition, but it's so tricky. I don't want everyone to think I'm just cribbing off Reichenbach. But they'll all be seeing it in their heads anyway. Anyone who cares about Euphrosynia Heterodyne went to that ridiculous production at the Terpsichore Hall." Her lips are twisted in annoyance as she contemplates this. "You know there's already an opera in Paris about Baron Wulfenbach and the Lady Heterodyne?"

Well, that's just _absurd_. "How can they write an opera when nobody knows how it's going to end?"

"I guess they just - made something up that felt right." The girl taps her pen on her cheek, and her smile goes soft and fond again. "They could add in a bit of Sparkbabble and then crib from Sleeping Beauty. Nobody's actually going to complain if Baron Wulfenbach wakes up the Lady Heterodyne with a kiss."

She's never going to understand grownups. "I would," Elizabeth announces. "It doesn't make scientific sense."

"That's what makes it romantic!" The notebook has vanished; the girl is beaming at the book display. She pulls down _The Heterodyne and the Hierophants_ and holds it up to her chest with _Frozen Just In Time_ like she's trying to fend off the force of Elizabeth's glare. "It's no sillier than most fairy tales. Come down to the Myth and Folklore shelf and I'll show you the one about the Spark who made an eternally-growing house of gingerbread. It's in Lloyd's anthologies." And then she looks at Elizabeth again and it's obvious, from the bitten lip, when the thought of _potential reader_ is jolted away by the thought of _four feet tall_. "Unless you're supposed to wait here? Are your parents coming back?"

"Father will be out of the Odd Book Room in an hour or three," Elizabeth tells her, with a sigh. She's sick and tired of being ten. "He said to meet up at the tea counter." He said to find some things to read on the train, too. He said to put them on his account. He possibly didn't think it all the way through.

\--

But late that night, slumped in a train seat and watching a silver school of sardines slip past outside without really seeing them, Elizabeth isn't thinking of Sleeping Beauty, for all that that's the first story in _Lloyd's Familiar Fairytales_ open on her lap. She's thinking of Londinium before it was Londinium, before their glorious Queen made it her own. She's thinking of a man who told his companions, _Bury my head here, and Britain will always be safe._

She's thinking of what Arthur said when he handed his sword back to Albia, at least in the Chrétien de Troyes version. _I will wake again when you call me,_ he said. _When Britain needs me, I will wake._ There are stories like that all over Europa, too. Charlemagne of France, Csaba of Hungary. It's practically a job requirement for legendary kings. 

Mechanicsburg isn't a mountain, but the Heterodyne isn't a helpless maiden. Maybe what Baron Wulfenbach should be looking for is a hunter's horn. It worked for the poor shepherds in Arthur's cave.

Or, given that it's the Heterodyne he wants to wake up, maybe ringing the Doom Bell would do the trick. The Doom Bell is in Mechanicsburg; working around that would be a suitably heroic challenge. She'll have to write that girl at Cambridge after all. Maybe she can work it into her next book.

Something long and sinuous flashes past the window, and half-dozing as she is it takes Elizabeth a panicked moment to identify it as a clump of seaweed, shadowed and ambiguous. It's amazing they let it grow so near the tube. 

There are other things sleeping in Mechanicsburg. There's supposed to be a dragon guarding the treasury, not that it's any scarier an idea than an angry Heterodyne.

There's supposed to be a dragon beneath Mount Etna, too. Nobody talks about waking him up in an hour of need; nobody needs their towns destroyed and their fields poisoned. Dragons aren't something you can steer.

\--


End file.
